Chapter 10.—There Was No
Other More Suitable Way of Freeing Man from the Misery of Mortality
Than The Incarnation of the Word. The Merits Which are Called Ours
are the Gifts of God.

13. Those then who say, What, had
God no other way by which He might free men from the misery of this
mortality, that He should will the only-begotten Son, God
co-eternal with Himself, to become man, by putting on a human soul
and flesh, and being made mortal to endure death?—these, I say,
it is not enough so to refute, as to assert that that mode by which
God deigns to free us through the Mediator of God and men, the man
Christ Jesus, is good and suitable to the dignity of God; but we
must show also, not indeed that no other mode was possible to God,
to whose power all things are equally subject, but that there
neither was nor need have been any other mode more appropriate for
curing our misery. For what was so necessary for the building up of
our hope, and for the freeing the minds of mortals cast down by the
condition of mortality itself, from despair of immortality, than
that it should be demonstrated to us at how great a price God rated
us, and how greatly He loved us? But what is more manifest and
evident in this so great proof hereof, than that the Son of God,
unchangeably good, remaining what He was in Himself, and receiving
from us and for us what He was not, apart from any loss of His own
nature, and deigning to enter into the fellowship of ours, should
first, without any evil desert of His own, bear our evils; and so
with unobligated munificence should bestow His own gifts upon us,
who now believe how much God loves us, and who now hope that of
which we used to despair, without any good deserts of our own, nay,
with our evil deserts too going before?

14. Since those also which are
called our deserts, are His gifts. For, that faith may work by
love,806806Gal. v. 5 “the love
of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is
given unto us.”807807Rom. v. 4, 5 And He was
then given, when Jesus was glorified by the resurrection. For then
He promised that He Himself would send Him, and He sent Him;808808John xx. 22, vii. 39, and
xv. 26 because
then, as it was written and foretold of Him, “He ascended up on
high, He led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men.”809809Eph. iv. 8 and Ps. lxviii.
18 These gifts
constitute our deserts, by which we arrive at the chief good of an
immortal blessedness. “But God,” says the apostle,
“commendeth His love towards as, in that, while we were yet
sinners, Christ died for us. Much more, then, being now justified
by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him.” To this
he goes on to add, “For if, when we were enemies, we were
reconciled to God by the death of His Son; much more, being
reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.” Those whom he first
calls sinners he afterwards calls the enemies of God; and those
whom he first speaks of as justified by His blood, he afterwards
speaks of as reconciled by the death of the Son of God; and those
whom he speaks of first as saved from wrath through Him, he
afterwards speaks of as saved by His life. We were not, therefore,
before that grace merely anyhow sinners, but in such sins that we
were enemies of God. But the same apostle calls us above several
times by two appellations, viz. sinners and enemies of
God,—one as if the most mild, the other plainly the most
harsh,—saying, “For if when we were yet weak, in due time
Christ died for the ungodly.”810810Rom. v. 6–10 Those whom he called weak, the same
he called ungodly. Weakness seems something slight; but sometimes
it is such as to be called impiety. Yet except it were weakness,
it 175would not need a physician, who is in the Hebrew Jesus,
in the Greek
Σωτήρ, but in our speech
Saviour. And this word the Latin language had not previously, but
could have seeing that it could have it when it wanted it. And this
foregoing sentence of the apostle, where he says, “For when we
were yet weak, in due time He died for the ungodly,” coheres with
those two following sentences; in the one of which he spoke of
sinners, in the other of enemies of God, as though he referred each
severally to each, viz. sinners to the weak, the enemies of
God to the ungodly.